The Sauce Labs Open Source Engineering Team

Open source software and open source communities have played a foundational role in Sauce Labs's existence. Without Selenium, Sauce would have been unable to fulfill its vision of a lock-in-free automated testing cloud. Clearly, we owe a lot to the Selenium WebDriver community, not to mention the debt we have to the maintainers of the countless other open source projects we rely on every day as we build our products.

At Sauce we've always strived to take our responsibility to open source communities seriously. We've developed a number of helper libraries in the open. We have and still do offer free testing to open source projects through our "Open Sauce" program. And of course our biggest contribution to the world of open source has been the introduction of Appium to mobile testers around the world, and our continued mission of pushing mobile automation into the future via stewardship of Appium.

As we continue to grow as a company, we felt it was essential to enshrine our commitment to open source and open source values (e.g., transparency and collaboration) in an official role within the company. This role is designed to help Sauce keep in touch with our open source roots even as we attract more and more large enterprise customers. It is designed to ensure we are giving back to the projects we rely on most significantly as a company (Selenium and Appium, first and foremost). It is designed to engage our opportunities strategically, from the perspective of open source values and practices. In short, it is designed to protect the soul of Sauce - revolutionary and open-source testing at scale, by developers and testers, for developers and testers - as we move forward into the future.

Having played the role of Appium project lead for several years now, this new role was something I felt that we needed strongly at Sauce. It is therefore my great pleasure to announce that I have now taken this responsibility, officially as 'Director of Open Source' at Sauce. I cannot wait to build a team around our vision of Sauce Labs as a deeply engaged member of more and more open source efforts. We don't want to build proprietary testing standards. We want the best automation frameworks to be free and open source, and we've built Sauce to take the headache out of scaling, maintaining, and getting insights out of your tests. From our perspective, there will always be a reason for us to engage open source communities, and we invite our competitors to join us in doing so!

In conjunction with the launch of our Open Source Engineering Team, I'm also happy to announce that Sauce Labs has joined the TODO Group, a consortium of open source advocates that are blazing the trail in bringing open source philosophy and practice to all companies, from startups to large enterprises. I couldn't be more excited to learn from and contribute to these conversations about how to "do open source" well as a company, and I know Sauce's customers will benefit as a result.

This is just the beginning of what I hope to bring to Sauce and Sauce's customers in this new role. I certainly welcome your thoughts and feedback on how and where Sauce Labs can take play a more active part in open source projects and communities relevant to our industry. Also: stay tuned for a very exciting open source-related announcement, coming soon!